


Defiance

by ShyPumpkin



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Angst, M/M, Post-Sburb, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-25
Updated: 2011-09-25
Packaged: 2017-10-24 00:46:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/256975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ShyPumpkin/pseuds/ShyPumpkin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five years after Sburb, Karkat reflects on his relationship with John</p>
            </blockquote>





	Defiance

An envelope has never felt heavier.

You take a deep breath and grip it tighter, but nothing can calm the clenched one-two of your aortic pump nor soothe the hateful thoughts stopping you from dropping the envelope in the box before you.

You scoff. How much goddamn effort is required to claim something for yourself? 

You curl inwards. John Egbert destroys all your attempts at judgement, but he should be irrelevant now. 

No one is here to stop you. He certainly is not. 

If your life were a romcom, he would clear the corner,take the envelope from your hands, and beg you to come with him. He would wrap up years of suffering in trite declarations and reality would be boiled down to sugary idealism.

But your life is not a romcom, and John Egbert will never be yours.

You’ve known this for sweeps; it is practically a building block of the universe, and, definitely, the cornerstone of your own romantic fate. You live, breathe, and marinate in this rejection. Only recently you have you come to accept it as a good thing. You're pathetic. You should have been done with him the first time he ripped out your aortic pump, but instead, you kept giving him the chance to repeat the process. Time has wore you down. Now whenever blue text assaults your eyes, you feel queasy. All your wounds from past experiences throb, begging you not to give in to temptation, to ignore him, to simply let him go. But, fool you are, you march blindly on, thoughtlessly accepting his pestermessages. You’re armed only with your acid tongue, and your tongue has never gotten anywhere close to bothering John Egbert (not that you couldn’t think of methods to bother him with it, but you just fucking respect him too much.)

There are myriad things you will never understand about yourself. You will never comprehend why you end up sitting on the floor of his room practically every Friday night for the past five years repeating the same visual cues (movie flashing, your eyes meeting every so often as you check for the other’s approval, his teeth pulling on his bottom lip, his back arching against his bed, his shoulders dipping, his lips moving with what you had decided could only be asinine comments aimed at the movie), the same sounds (irrelevant movie dialogue, his laugh that starts out in his nose and the pitch falls as if he is letting all his glee out in a single cliff-dive of emotion), and that same stint of physical contact that you hate yourself for relishing in (your shoulders brushing, the touch crescendoing till the practical seizures he has when he laughs lands his side flush against yours, his hand gripping yours because you “look so apprehensive all the time, dude,” and his head resting softly against your shoulder). You don't even want to touch why you go putt putt golfing every couple of weeks in the summer (it’s certainly not because it’s “totally fun, and you know it”), hang out at the diner on the weekends just to get pie (pie is a disgusting conglomeration of sugar, mush, and dry flaky bullshit, and you will stand by this forever), or go to see each and every one of the piano performances that John had to see for class (piano wasn’t completely useless, as long as John Egbert was the one playing it.)

There are two things you know for sure: one, ‘John Egbert’ should be officially deemed an altered state of consciousness, and two, it’s slowly becoming evident that he’s something you need to join a support group for since you “just can’t quit him”. (Occasionally, you sit in your room at night, a blanket pulled over your head, and you watch Brokeback Mountain, pretending that Sburb was your ranch and that no woman John brings into the equation could ever understand your days on the range making sweet, rough love to him. Your mind never lets you forget that the “sweet love making” is only a shard of your ruined imagination, but you still bring up the thought, trying to swallow the lump that forms in the base of your throat down with containers of grubjuice like an old drunkard while mumbling the dialogue under your breath.)

Sometimes, you wonder if everyone has the same experience with John. Each of his two and a half girlfriends sought him out, clung to his every word, and were subsequently dumped by him (the ‘half’, John assured you, did not count as they only dated a week. However, you had definitely devoured enough containers of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia to put on a solid six pounds that week, and, emotional damage done, you decided that she had more than earned her place on the list. In the interest of compromise, you took the average of one and zero because compromise “was the fairest way to go about things, duh.”)

He never failed to let the girls down easily, but each time there was a new one, it took its toll on you. It was so hard to see them happy with him, knowing that a set of fucking genitals stopped you by default from ever requesting Egbertian kissing bliss (your genitals held little importance to you, and you would change them if you could. But, it would never make a difference. It was too painful to think about sometimes, but you didn’t know why you bothered. He would never want to be with someone as pathetic and angry as you.)

But, despite your shared pain, you’d never reach out to them. At least when their relationship with John ended, it ended. But you? You still woke up on far too many Saturdays to a constant 15-second loop of Aerosmith wailing (why John had decided that he deserved his own ringtone was beyond you), still ended up playing too many stupid games and participating in far more absolutely brainless activities (apples to apples you could stomach far better than an apple-picking extravaganza where you weaved through a corn maze on some sort of nerd adventure for enlightenment), and fell asleep on his floor on far too many occasions (your preoccupation with the sound of his raspy, annoying, and yet, somehow endearing breathing, never yielded a particularly fulfilling night of rest). You would be lying if you said that you weren’t in the smallest bit jealous of them (although, the thought of losing him pains you at your core.)

You couldn’t get that distance by default, no one came up to you and told you to stop (other than yourself and liberally reading between the lines of concerned glances from friends). There was a part of you that liked being close to him, no matter how difficult it was (which had lead you into a stint of being a self-identified masochist, but you stopped labeling yourself as such when it slipped out once in conversation with Equius and made for a very awkward backward shuffle).

It doesn’t matter how much you consider backing away, as he keeps pulling the two of you back together. Fuck, does it hurt. Sometimes, you think it would be easier if he just ignored you (then you remember the time he went to Canada over summer break and you didn’t hear from him for three weeks. It had done nothing short of reducing you to an absolute mess. You hid in your house and glared at your calendar, as if your rage could fuel a time jump).

As far as he is concerned, you’re the best of buddies, two of a kind, never to be separated. He makes you go everywhere with him, even places you would never want to be (his annual check ups, joke shop runs, and ski trips were one thing, shopping for gifts for his girlfriend was quite another). This made you simultaneously want to punch his stupid smile straight back into the back of his throat, and kiss him. Someday, you would find a way to do that to someone, but that day, you were sure, would never be spent with John Egbert.

You clench your teeth and wonder if this is betrayal.

But, you are tired. There is no rest for the wicked, and certainly no rest for the idiotic. John was your routine, loving him was your crutch, and anything that you derived from this was simply your life. You had been obsessed with him so long that losing him would amount to losing your identity. But, you were ready for change; a little death of character was what the end of high school seemed to call for (at least that’s how all your peers behaved, roaming the hallways between classes as if their spirit had been sucked straight out).

You turn the envelope in your hand over once, twice, three times. Memories overwhelm you; John slinging his arm around you and dragging you on college tours, helping you narrow down your “buddy college list,” and deciding where to go together. 

But you cannot follow him any longer. This is where the two of you must part.

The envelope contains your first and most dastardly act of defiance. You will be going to another college. 

You look down again, crinkling the envelope in your hand. Your phone buzzes in your pocket. You yank it out, bitter resentment manifesting in a small frown as you read “1 new message from John.” You draw in a shaky breath.

Your life is not a romcom and you will delude yourself no longer.

With reckless abandon, you throw the letter in the mailbox. It clinks shut and finalizes the decision in your heart. There is no fanfare, no big parade; just an empty hand and an empty soul.

Shoving your phone back into your pocket, you walk back to your house and wonder how long it will take the fear swelling inside you to subside.

Far longer, you decide, than it will take to answer his text. But, for now, you let yourself be the smallest bit freer.


End file.
